I’ve excerpted an article below, showing that, while the US Economy nominally grew from a GDP of $13.8 Trillion to $17.4 Trillion, the US Trucking Industry diesel consumption fell from 4.3 million barrels per day to 3.8 million barrels from 2007 to 2014, and it had nothing to do with gas mileage.

For GDP to have grown 26%, while trucking fell over 10%, seems to be a big disconnect to me. All else being equal (never) it would appear that GDP growth was all due to 4.5% inflation above what the government number crunchers are telling us.

As a secondary note, I see in the chart below that Trucking Fuel Efficiency fell off a cliff between 1965 and 1970 – from 7.8 to 5.5 miles per gallon. Does anybody out there know why?

Dr. Patrick Moore, who was one of the original founders of Greenpeace who left the organization in disgust of their current political zealotry, and Greenpeace is now trying to have him erased from history for daring to do that. He has now produced this interesting video in conjunction with with Prager University that is sure to put some people into conniption fits.

Global Warming activists will tell you that CO2 is bad and dangerous. The EPA has even classified it as a pollutant. But is it? Patrick Moore provides some surprising facts about the benefits of CO2 that you won’t hear in the current debate.

The Housing/Gold ratio is a quite useful measure for evaluating relative values between real estate and gold, and also has an interesting historical track record for identifying turning points in long-term gold price trends. In light of the commodities rout occurring in the summer of 2015, and the continuing strength in housing – it is worthwhile revisiting this basic measure, because the results aren’t at all what most people likely think they are.

The graph below shows the Housing/Gold ratio for the modern era in the United States, from when gold investment was legalized on December 31, 1974 through November of 2011. When analyzed at that time (link here), the ratio clearly showed an historic outlier was being reached in terms of gold being expensive relative to real estate.

Limiting Power of the EPA? On his web site, 35-plus year veteran of the EPA Alan Carlin and author of Environmentalism Gone Mad, brieflydescribes how today’s EPA went from an organization representing the best interests of the American public to one representing a small segment of it, the extreme radical environmental movement. The EPA is a creature of President Nixon’s political thanking, who cobbled together a government entity without need for legislative review and oversight. As such, the administrator of the EPA answers only to the President, the executive branch of government; and not to Congress, the legislative branch. This arrangement is contrary to principles behind the Constitution, which was designed to provide a separation of powers, where the ambitions of one branch were counter-balanced by the ambitions of another.

One of the most ironic and fascinating characteristics about an asset bubble is that central banks claim they can’t recognize one until after it bursts. And Wall Street apologists tend to ignore the manifestation of bubbles because the profit stream is just too difficult to surrender.

The excuses for piling money into a particular asset class and sending prices several standard deviations above normal are made to seem rational at the time: Housing prices have never gone down on a national basis and people have to live somewhere, the internet will replace all brick and mortar stores, and perhaps the classic example is that variegated tulips are so rare they should be treated like gold.